Urban life is the inspiration for choreographers Wayne McGregor and Jonathan Watkins in Infra(2008) and As One(2010) from The Royal Ballet’s latest triple. Both works explore the idea of identity in the urban world and show people as individuals and as part of a group. As One begins with a solo that expands into a collective dance; Infra shows a group of commuters and zooms in on individuals and couples. The dancers break out into their own worlds, some engaging in fraught relationships, others in dialogues with themselves. Their bodies twitch and flicker in an angular dance style to Graham Fitkin’s Stravinskian score and to Max Richter’s minimalist score with its sounds of city life.

This onstage activity is underpinned by both works’ sets. Infra means ‘below’ and suggests what lies beneath. Julian Opie’s electronic screen is set high above the stage with anonymous figures walking across, uninvolved, as if on a bridge or a road. Underneath, the human body is fully realized with the physical and emotional presence of the dancers on stage. The same concept is used in As One with Simon Daw’s set of video screens acting as windows into the lives of those in a tower block. The action on stage focuses on a house party, a couple’s living room, a waiting room and a banker’s office.

The idea that other people’s lives are being briefly revealed before us is also illustrated in Infra when six couples are framed in windows of light; we look voyeuristically into various strangers’ lives. Each pas de deux is different and yet they somehow mirror each other, suggesting humankind’s interconnectedness.

We are reminded of our need to connect and to reach out to others when, at one shocking moment, the stage is swarmed with people who walk across the stage uninterested and oblivious to one another, as in the rush-hour of a city commute. In the centre of this crowd Sarah Lamb, invisible and silent to all, is overcome with loneliness and falls to the ground, wailing uncontrollably. In the programme notes, McGregor says ‘physical empathies…rescue the lost narratives of the population on stage’, perhaps to create what Watkin’s calls a ‘harmonious coexistence’.

- Jane Bentham

]]>http://www.roh.org.uk/news/urban-ballet/feed0Searching for The Cunning Little Vixenhttp://www.roh.org.uk/news/searching-for-the-cunning-little-vixen
http://www.roh.org.uk/news/searching-for-the-cunning-little-vixen#commentsThu, 11 Mar 2010 14:51:25 +0000Royal Opera Househttp://blog.roh.org.uk/?p=619The idea of looking for foxes must strike Londoners as a little strange. Every evening as I walk home I see our vulpine neighbour scavenging in the bins, leaving half-eaten detritus in his or her wake. When Janáček was writing The Cunning Little Vixen, however, he really had to seeking them out. His friend Vincenc Sládek, who was the local forester, used to take the composer up into the hills around Janáček's native Hukvaldy to see foxes in the wild. Much later on, Sládek’s nephew remembered one of these amusing treks:

"As if to order, the Vixen’s family emerged from the den and began to show off and frisk about. Janáček started fidgeting until in the end he frightened the foxes away. ‘Why couldn’t you keep still Dr. Janáček? You could have gone on looking!’ Janáček, completely exhilarated and happy, just brushed this aside with the words, ‘I saw her! I saw her!’ and there was no holding him any more."

A few years ago, inspired by stories of Janáček’s fieldwork, I decided to leave the suburban foxes of London and seek out the original Cunning Little Vixen. Hukvaldy is a sleepy village, tucked in the northeastern corner of Moravia, near the Polish border. Having travelled from Brno, the industrial city where the composer spent most of his life, I wanted to follow Janáček’s footsteps. My iPod in hand, I left the quiet settlement behind and started tramping through the bracken, higher and higher. The sun peaked through the leaf canopy overhead, though the forest was oddly still and there was no Vixen's family to be seen. I passed the knotty routes of age-old trees and the heady scent of ferns filled the air, but Janáček’s Bystrouška remained elusive. Disappointedly I clambered back through the undergrowth and walked on back toward the village. Suddenly I saw her, sat proudly on a rock, surveying the land that inspired Janáček’s opera. She was oddly still, almost statuesque. I sat by her feet and listened to the Forester’s final words in the opera. If only the vixen had been real… if only a baby frog had jumped into my hands.